Graham Fraser realized that the protests in Canada against the government’s Covid measures had really gotten out of hand when the demonstrators in the capital Ottawa misused the statue of Terry Fox for their own purposes. Fox is honored with a memorial near Parliament for setting out on a memorable run in 1980. Fraser, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and once a professor of Canadian Studies at the McGill Institute, says anyone who trespasses on this statue is trespassing on the nation’s memory.
For almost a week and a half, truckers and other demonstrators have been protesting in Ottawa against compulsory vaccination and the requirement to wear masks in supermarkets, for example. According to city police chief Peter Sloly, 3,000 trucks and almost 15,000 people took to the streets against the measures the weekend before last. Last weekend there were still 1,000 trucks and 5,000 people. Day and night, Fraser says on the phone, the truckers honked their horns.
All of this would have caused quite a stir in a country like Canada, which is known to be calm and reasonable or even pleasantly boring. At first, says Fraser, despite the infernal noise of the horns, many people still thought that one had to endure it, not least because of the freedom to demonstrate. But the Terry Fox thing went too far.
If you talk to Canadians about what has happened in their capital in the past week and a half, but also in provinces such as Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba or Saskatchewan, where there have also been protests against the state’s corona rules, the outrage sounds almost touching at first. One learns, for example, that it was “publicly urinated”. People would have made themselves comfortable on a memorial honoring the war dead.
Terry Fox is a role model in Canada. an idol.
That sounds like an almost friendly form of protest compared to what supporters of former US President Donald Trump, who was voted out of office, organized a year ago on Washington’s Capitol Hill. But it still weighs heavily, because in Canada the standards of what is socially acceptable have not been pushed as far as in the USA.
The statue of Terry Fox: He lost a leg to cancer as a teenager. Nevertheless, in 1980 he set out to cross the country to raise money for cancer patients. There were 24.5 million people living in Canada at the time (38 million today) and Fox hoped to get a dollar from each individual. He ran a marathon every day.
After 143 days and 5373 kilometers he could no longer. But his course of pain pointed beyond himself and beyond him. Fox died of cancer at the age of 22 and became a national icon. an idol. An example.
The Covid protesters in Ottawa wrapped his statue in flags and in banners inscribed with their slogans. For people who are not familiar with the history of Canada: a trifle. For most Canadians: an affront.
“Something spilled over here from the USA”
Jessica Johnson is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian magazine The Walruswhich has to be imagined as the American one new Yorker, just more Canadian: The magazine is just as great, a mixture of politics and poetry, but it doesn’t make a profit, it’s set up as a foundation. Johnson says: “Something has spilled over here from the USA, and I don’t yet know exactly why that is.” By that she means that Southern flags can now be seen at Covid protests in Canada. That parts of the demonstrators are openly racist. There are articles in the Canadian press about how protesters taunt Asian women.
In Ottawa, trucks honk their horns and make a deafening noise
(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis/AFP)
Johnson lives in Toronto. About half of the inhabitants of this city belong to a minority group. There is hardly a place on earth whose inner city looks so much like a gathering of all parts of the world. Since her partner lives in Ottawa, right next to Parliament, she still saw the protests up close. She says, “These people mostly behaved like hooligans. And many of them reminded me of the people of the MAGA movement who went to Donald Trump events in the United States.” MAGA stands for “Make America Great Again”.
According to government figures, 84 percent of the population in Canada have been vaccinated. So one cannot speak of a vaccine-skeptical country. But the vaccination-skeptical minority has recently been very loud.
In the USA, the comparatively low vaccination rates cannot always be explained politically, but mostly. Among many Republicans, there is an aversion to the vaccine simply because Democrats recommend it. Up to now, Canada has not experienced this extreme and partly irrational division. Former Professor Fraser says, a little amused but mostly frustrated: “There is also a deep lack of understanding of how politics works in this country.”
Premier Trudeau cannot do anything about the Corona measures
The protesters have moved to the capital, Ottawa, to lodge their protest directly with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. However, says Fraser, Canada is an extremely federal country, which means that the states can decide for themselves whether masks or vaccinations are compulsory. Trudeau’s power to change anything is extremely limited. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t do anything in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba or Saskatchewan, for example.
Trudeau recently fell ill with Covid. Nonetheless, he made a statement. The demonstrators, he said, are a “fringe minority.” Some truckers immediately painted this newly awarded title of the “fringe minority” on their posters.
Ottawa’s police chief Peter Sloly had already declared a state of emergency in the capital on Sunday. This gives the police more powers to take action against the demonstrators. Most observers therefore assume that the bulk of the protests will soon be over, perhaps as early as next weekend.
The hard core of the demonstrators, on the other hand, have announced that they want to hold out in the center of the capital until all corona measures are lifted.